Globetrotting Antitrust: How Rebecca Slaughter Became the World’s Unwilling Tech Referee
Rebecca Slaughter, the U.S. Federal Trade Commissioner whose surname feels like destiny’s idea of a punchline, is presently touring the globe with a suitcase full of antitrust briefs and the weary smile of someone who knows every airport lounge smells the same. From Brussels to Brasília, regulators are leaning in to hear how Washington plans to slay the latest batch of tech leviathans without accidentally kneecapping the digital economies their own citizens have come to depend on for cat videos and same-day diapers. It’s a tightrope act performed over a lava pit of geopolitical resentment, and Slaughter—trim, precise, and armed with jurisprudential nunchaku—has drawn a bigger crowd than most rock bands.
The international fascination is easy to explain: whatever the FTC does to Amazon, Meta, Google, or the next startup that’s pivoting to AI-generated sandwiches ripples across oceans faster than a tax-dodging yacht. When Brussels fines Apple €1.8 billion, Apple simply books a smaller yacht. But when Washington talks about breaking up a platform that undergirds a third of the planet’s advertising revenue, every finance minister from Lagos to Laos starts re-calculating GDP forecasts on the back of a napkin. Slaughter’s speeches therefore arrive with subtitles in eight languages and a warning label: “May cause sudden market vertigo.”
Her current crusade—blocking Microsoft’s cloud-based acquisition of Activision—has turned into a spectator sport from Seoul to Stockholm. South Korean gamers fear losing their precious League of Legends latency; Swedish pension funds fret that their Microsoft-heavy portfolios will sprout a conscience and underperform. Meanwhile, Chinese regulators watch with the detached amusement of chess grandmasters seeing the West try to castle after already moving its king. They’ve been clipping Tencent’s wings for years; now they get to see if Washington can pull off the same maneuver without looking like it’s copying homework.
The irony, of course, is that Slaughter’s loudest applause comes from foreign governments that have no intention of importing her exact playbook. France nods approvingly at her “protect the consumer” rhetoric while quietly funneling subsidies to its own national champions. India applauds her stance on data portability, then passes rules that conveniently hamstring every non-Indian firm. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of complimenting your neighbor’s lawn while fertilizing yours with the clippings you stole at midnight.
Yet beneath the cynicism lies a genuine inflection point. Slaughter’s insistence that antitrust is “not about big being bad, but about bad being big” has become a lingua franca for regulators who previously only communicated via WTO filings and passive-aggressive footnotes. In Nairobi, officials quote her speeches when grilling Safaricom about mobile-money fees. In Canberra, her line about “democratic participation in digital markets” is repurposed to justify poking Facebook until it coughs up the algorithmic black box. The woman has become a meme—an impeccably tailored meme—circulating through policy WhatsApp groups at 2 a.m. local time everywhere.
There is, naturally, collateral damage. Smaller nations without FTC-sized budgets now feel obligated to produce glossy antitrust strategies that read like Mad Libs filled in by interns. (“Our agency will ensure [tech giant] does not [vague verb] [local startup] thereby harming [cherished national value].”) Meanwhile, multinational law firms have opened pop-up offices in places previously famous only for a really good mango, ready to bill $900 an hour for expertise in “comparative Slaughter-ism.”
Still, one has to admire the spectacle: a single American regulator has managed to export existential dread to boardrooms from Toronto to Tel Aviv without firing a shot. The next time a European commissioner mentions “Rebecca’s Doctrine,” note the slight shudder that passes through the room. It’s the same tremor you feel when the dentist says, “This might pinch a little,” right before the drill starts singing.
When the history of early-21st-century digital governance is written, Slaughter’s name will appear in the footnotes of footnotes—right next to the clause that explains why your smart fridge now asks for informed consent before reordering oat milk. And if that isn’t a fitting epitaph for our era, I don’t know what is.
